It’s really weird (and sad) to read excited science stories that were published a week ago about the interesting experiments taking place … aboard the Columbia’s latest mission in space. But there was, indeed, some cool stuff going on — including research into the behavior of flames in zero-g situations. Apparently you get “flame balls”, which burn incredibly small amounts of fuel, a trick that car engineers would love to learn more about. You also get some just plain wacky flame physics:

They’re creatures of space: tiny flames that curl into balls and flit around like UFOs. They burn using almost no fuel at all, dim and often hard to see. … Ronney says he has no idea what would make a flame ball fly around in a spiral. “Flame balls move for two reasons,” he explains. “First, when they exhaust the fuel in their vicinity, they drift toward regions with more. They follow the fuel like a little organism. Second, they can drift due to slight accelerations of the shuttle.” Neither of these effects would produce a corkscrew flight path.